Animation in its various incarnations can be extremely labor intensive. In its most traditional form, individual cels must be drawn so that a sequencing through the cels in quick succession produces the desired effect. With this technique, if an individual cel is later found to be incorrect or a change in the animation is desired, an entire group of cels may need to be discarded.
The advent of the computer has enabled the production of individual cels to be sped up to some extent and facilitated easier editing of existing cels. However, conventional computer assisted animation techniques still do not readily allow changes to the animation to be made “on the fly” or in the middle of a sequence without the need to manually re-edit several, if not many, frames thereafter. Moreover, because most animation, is based upon a sequence of key frames, a single change affecting timing can skew the rest of the animation, such that its synchronization with audio is jeopardized, if not ruined. This is a particular problem when the synchronization relates to the correspondence of mouth images with the audio. A skew between the audio and images can result in a finished product that looks like a poorly dubbed movie. Additionally, if an animation is created for one language, it is currently difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce the same animation in another language in a quick and cost-efficient manner.
Additionally, once an animation is completed the individual cels are typically unusable to produce a new animation, unless the cels are used as is. Thus, in order to produce a series of episodes of a show including animations, new animation cels must be created for each episode, thereby significantly increasing the cost of creating the series.
Moreover, the process of creating animation sequences using traditional techniques also makes it difficult, if not impossible, to have an animated character interact with a living person in a live and spontaneous or impromptu manner without any prior coordination between them.
Furthermore, there is presently no cost effective, non-highly labor intensive way to re-use or generate new footage from old cells or film footage.